The Tragedy and Death of the Lonely God and the Rise of the Trickster. Or: How Moffat re-booted DW
The meta café is back! (And no one's around. Ah well, that's life. *g*) Before we start, a little background for this particular meta:
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time: hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.
SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
Doctor Who?
You can see New Who as the Doctor trying to work out who he is now, what with a) Being the murderer of his own kind and b) If he's the only Timelord left, then what a Timelord is is up to him. Ten searches high and low for something to be, some kind of self, some sort of definition (Rose's Love, Martha's Hero, Donna's Friend, The Timelord Victorious) but in the end can only be what he is: The Doctor ("It's my honour"). And so S5 and 6 is the story of trying to find his way back, step by difficult step, re-learning what makes him him. And although he's going in the right direction, there are wrong turns and many pitfalls (Ten was *so* screwed up), until he manages to finally be back where he was: The Doctor. Just the Doctor.
Or, to quote malsperanza (from this post):
To me that is rather interesting, and I think is connected with the idea of the Withheld Hero, though I'm not sure how. Sometimes heroes do not grow, learn, become better people, blah blah, because they don't need to. Odysseus doesn't need to "learn" anything; there are no moral lessons for him in the end. What he needs is to Get Home; he is the same man at the beginning and end of the poem. Ditto Jack Sparrow--in contrast to the young romantic hero of PotC, who undergoes a radical transformation from polite working-class fellow to law-breaking pirate and thence to member of the upper class (by marriage).
You see how perfectly this fits with the most basic concept of Doctor Who? To quote Moffat:
The story happens to the companion, not The Doctor. It’s only when he’s got someone to show off to that its happening. That’s why I think the story starts again every time a new person takes that decision to go into that blue box.
But RTD changed that - during the Specials he placed the Doctor squarely in the centre of everything (and this had been building for quite some time). Which means that in order to become himself again, the Doctor needed to step out of the spotlight and become the Withheld Hero/Trickster once more. Which proved to be an interesting and rather unusual journey, actually...
ETA: Please allow me to gloat a tiny little bit, as what I have described so far was exactly what Day of the Doctor did. Right down to the phrasing:
[Spoilers for Day of the Doctor]
Clara: We’ve got enough warriors. And any old idiot can be a hero.
Eleven: Then what do I do?
Clara: What you’ve always done. Be a Doctor!
And later:
Eleven: At last I know where I'm going. Where I've always been going. Home, the long way round.
♥
Let’s begin with how the Doctor ‘went wrong’. I think it’s generally acknowledged that RTD *broke* the Doctor, and Moffat’s been putting him back together, and here I am interested in the *how*. Because I think that was RTD did was to turn the Doctor into a Tragic Hero. I’m not saying he did this deliberately (or even consciously), but that was the end result. Allow me to illustrate:
The Tragic Hero
- the protagonist suffers
- the protagonist stands before a decision
- the protagonist decides in an "unnatural" way, denying personal emotions and urges
- the protagonist endures more than s/he deserves
- the protagonist has a dark/bad fate from the beginning but is unable to accept responsibility for her/his flaws/weaknesses
- the protagonist is of noble descent but in a way that the audience is able to identify
- the protagonist has to see and understand her/his fate as well as understanding that her/his behavior will be her/his doom
- the hero story should combine fear and empathy
- ideally, the protagonist is a king or leader who draws his people into the abyss, too, while they're the witnesses
- the protagonist has to be intelligent and able to learn from mistakes
- tragic virtue
(Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805)
I’m not even going to do my usual thing of illustrating stuff with images, because it doesn’t need it. It’s that obvious. Now the funny thing is that this is actually what I've been saying all along. Ten is a hero, Eleven is a wizard. And the Doctor ought to be a wizard. He even calls himself Gandalf. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let’s look at what KIND of Tragic Hero Ten is...
The Lonely God
There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human. (A point I won’t elaborate on, but which I think is fairy obvious.) Except - and oh, the irony of this is immense - the only way he can fit is as a god-like figure: Someone even more removed from humanity than an alien. Because the human world has rules and patterns, and someone with a Timelord's abilities can never be 'ordinary' and indeed he chafes at it, when he tries - he loves them, even as he is unable to be them. We see this in Family of Blood/Human Nature where he delights in turning himself human - and yet won’t go back.
So, focussed on fitting into their world, he ends up as humanity's god (both literally and narratively), and it is something of a thread going right through RTD’s Who...
Humanity prays/calls out to him, and he answers. They believe, and saves them. (Interestingly S2 is the only finale where this doesn’t apply, but then that is focussed squarely on the Doctor’s loss of Rose.) In the end he tries to set himself up as god of the whole universe (hello Mars!), and Ood Sigma may be the ultimate sign of this: The universe asks for his help to defeat Gallifrey (the Ood were given the gift of seeing through time and the ability to reach out to the Doctor, so he could save them...)
And the Doctor (not surprisingly with so much encouragement) sees himself as having to sacrifice himself to save the world (hello there god-complex, thinking we are Jesus?), because that is the pattern, that is the story he wants to fit into. He even gets a Requiem... (“The universe will sing you to your sleep.”)
And this is why Marble House accuses him: ‘If you are our God, our Saviour, then WHY DON'T YOU SAVE US [from ourselves]? ‘
Also this is why he has to be lonely - the pattern he tries to fit into is a monotheistic one. [Disregarding *actual* Christian theology - it all gets too complex there. /understatement ] But from a simplistic perspective, then he is a Lonely God.
Following on from this we can see why turning his companions into himself is so deadly, and has such terrible consequences. Both Rose and Donna literally become him, and it [almost] kills them (although he manages to save Rose - but not before she has created Jack). Trying to cram the knowledge of a Timelord into a human by force - both Rose and Donna absorb the ability to see all of time the way the Doctor does - is deadly, and nearly burns them up.
Martha gets a better deal by becoming his prophet/apostle, preaching the Good News - yet it is in many ways a thankless task, since he can never love her the way she wants him to. (And indeed, his love could be fatal, so she probably counts herself lucky in the end.)
But Jack, trying to model himself into the Doctor mould (and the whole of Torchwood, generally) is another cautionary tale: This sort of power/responsibility is too much for humans. Sarah Jane gets off better, but even she loses the love of her life, because of what she chooses to be. With great power comes great responsibility, and this both Jack and Sarah Jane learn to their cost.
And the problem is that this is not who the Doctor is. Ten is caught between worlds, denying his real nature, and the compromise tears him apart. Basically - by reaching for power that is wrong for him (like diesel in a petrol engine), he ends up destroying instead of healing.
We see this most clearly in Waters of Mars which is... anti-Doctor Who? I will bring out 'Intellect and Romance Triumph over Brute Force and Cynicism' a fair bit, but the resolution to Waters of Mars is every inch brute force and cynicism winning. After all, how else could you describe Adelaide's suicide?
Now the Doctor's story in New Who so far is really quite astonishing. When I say that RTD broke him, I really mean that. But to be able to go there - naturally, organically - and then [with Moffat] Back again... Damn that's impressive. Here, have a bunch of quotes to show what I mean:
DOCTOR:
Rose - there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation. The whole world's different because he's alive.
Father's Day
DOCTOR:
Adelaide, I've done this sort of thing before, in small ways, saved some little people. But never someone as important as you. Oh, I'm good!
ADELAIDE:
Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant? You?
Waters of Mars
DOCTOR (about Abigail):
Who's she?
KAZRAN:
Nobody important.
DOCTOR:
Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, and I've never met anyone who wasn't important before.
A Christmas Carol
See what I mean? There and back again... How on EARTH did RTD break the show so seamlessly that it seemed inevitable? How did we reach a point where a hero had to commit suicide in order for the Doctor to start caring? I guess in part it's the inevitability of it... He is told that he is The Lonely God, so that is what he becomes.
Now, apart from all the other problems with Godhood, the specific problems with the monotheistic approach Ten had was that a) That sort of god is omnipotent (which the Doctor, well, isn’t) and b) That sort of god can have no fellow deities. Other powers are either false gods or demons. There can be angels and apostles and all kinds of different followers, but people are either for him, or against him, and it makes the morality both more simplistic and more complicated. The Doctor has to be ‘good’, because otherwise the whole thing collapses, but what happens when he does something morally questionable? Water of Mars is straightforward, actually, because there he is a Fallen God, but otherwise the show tends to give him unequivocal evil to fight against (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, Evil Timelords) - they are evil, ergo he is good. Which is... difficult to work with, because he is so clearly flawed.
The Mad Man With A Box
Now what Moffat has done so brilliantly is that (apart from dismantling The Lonely God, as previously shown) he didn't throw the 'god' idea out of the window (because the Doctor does have powers that far outweigh any human's and to deny that would be foolish), but just changed it radically. Moffat (re-)turned the Doctor to a world of fairy tales and myths and magic. (Also see this whole post.) A world where every tree and every shadow might be alive, where the cosmos is filled with all kinds of powers, small and large, each with their allocated space, each with their own purpose, and governed by their own rules (and often a lot of symbolism - see hand-tying). Here, the Doctor's Trickster-character fits in. To quote malsperanza (I do that a lot):
The Trickster is often not the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
I think the important thing is that while the Doctor might be god-like from a human POV, in his own [green]world, he is quite simply being who/what he is supposed to be. He works with magic/science [‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'], and just operates on a different level to our world. His role is different to that of a human - just like a faun or centaur or dwarf or elf or fairy occupies a different role to a human, and has different powers and strengths. Neither better or worse, just different.
Let me throw in another quote - this one by lonewytch and it’s about CAL's symbol (which is just like Kazran's clock!):
While we're on norse mythology, I have to comment on the library/CAL's symbol. In the world tree and in many branches of shamanism, this world, the physical one we live in “middle earth” or Midgard meaning “the middle enclosure”, lies at the centre. Above we have the upperworld usually associated with the gods, and underneath, the underworld usually associated with the ancestors. CAL's symbol mirrors this concept nicely, the upper swirl and the lower swirl are reflections of each other, cupping the upper and lower worlds, while the circle of Midgard is at the centre.
Now the Doctor still occupies a somewhat god-like role, but it’s not one that puts him above humans in any way. Because mythical gods are fallible. The stories of the pagan gods (from any culture, really) are full of love and betrayal and war and trickery, as well as the gods interfering in human affairs - and not always doing so in a good way. Expecting 'perfection', or even inherent 'goodness', from the gods is invariably foolish. Not that the Doctor isn't good, but he is as prone to screwing up as anyone else. He acts from his own personal moral code, and this is sometimes different to humans’. Or other people’s. In both S5 and S6 we have forces fighting the Doctor, and although their methods are questionable, they themselves are acting from motives every bit as pure as the Doctor’s. To quote the Moff himself:
...but I remember one morning that Russell and I had a long email discussion about the banality of evil. Before we got bored! But I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' - it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that - the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view.
And this is why the common thread in Moffat’s Who so far isn’t ‘Save us’, but quite the opposite:
The Doctor quite simply can’t do it on his own. Now you can point out (and you’d be right to) that this is also the lesson from the Ten era. But Ten’s story is about the Doctor trying to do it on his own, and the folly therein, whereas Eleven (so far) is about learning to ask for help. (And the Christmas Special is the final piece - but I’ll get to that.)
Hades and Persephone
Of course River is pivotal in this since he isn't alone anymore - he has someone to hold him accountable, someone to challenge his presumptions and arrogance - a mirror, a helpmate, someone to balance him out. Much like the CAL/Kazran symbol, it’s about balance. And River is not someone abruptly gifted with Timelord powers - she is the Child of the TARDIS, as well as having been manipulated by the Silence, something she - and everyone connected to her - pays for dearly. But she is what she is - she can’t be undone, her powers cannot be taken from her, because they are an organic part of her.
I remember Promethia saying when watching The Big Bang, that the moment when the Doctor reappeared with River (after having saved her from the exploding TARDIS) her instinctive reaction was:
'Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now.'
And that truly is their role! Rather than a whole world (Gallifrey), aloof and remote, to watch over the universe, we have a Mother and a Father figure - very hands-on, but also elusive and mythical. Fairy tales, or myths, made real. And of course they're married. Notice that in the last two images in my composite picture (those from LKH and TWoRS) the Doctor is directly asking River for help. He is slowly learning that he can’t do everything by himself, and asking for help is beginning to be instinctual.
A straightforward love story is always inward looking, the characters caught up in each other. But the Doctor and River focussing only on each other is actually dangerous (unstoppable force/immovable object - also see the Master). They need to be side-by-side (or back-to-back), focussing all that energy out. Because the heart of Eleven's story in S6 is about restoring order, and the marriage is the final piece. To quote lonewytch again:
This is sealed by their marriage at the end of The Wedding of River Song where they are re-enacting the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage. This is a concept prevalent in myth and in rituals from different cultures, that of either symbolically or physically enacting the unification of the God and Goddess into One. The Doctor talks about the two of them being at either pole of the event which has caused time to collapse and that it is union of these poles through touch which will save the universe. This is fundamentally the union of masculine and feminine, of intellect (the Doctor in TWoRS) and Heart (River - who is fully acting from Love in the ep).
And now, isn't that just 'Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism' at its most basic? Here’s one I made earlier:
And this is why I made it. Really, thinking about it, then the Doctor getting married is the most Doctor-y thing he has ever done, and something which re-enforces everything the show stands for.
♥ ♥ ♥
But, to briefly touch on the actual heading for this, I shall quote the brilliant janie_aire:
Remember! Again, we get the juxtaposition of remembering and dying, which has been thematic throughout Eleven's run. In the Ancient Greek myths, the souls of the Dead were ferried across the River, where they would meet the Lord and Lady of the Underworld: Hades, Lord of Desire, who is the husband to and the end of Persephone, Goddess of Change, who is wife to and the end of Hades. The end of desire and the end of change (time) are complementary. They are each others' ends.
I am not going to go into detail re. Hades and Persephone, but for anyone interested, I’d urge you to go look up the myths. Here’s a very brief summary, courtesy of Promethia:
Persephone was the daughter of Demeter (goddess of grain and the harvest) by Zeus. Hades, god of the underworld, stole her away to be his wife, causing Demeter to throw fits of grief and cause famine throughout the land. Eventually the famine forced Hades to give her back (I think maybe Zeus intervened to make his brother give her up?), but while in the underworld, Persephone had consumed six pomegranate seeds and, what with the way these things work, it meant that she was never able to fully leave the underworld again. So basically Hades and Demeter worked out an arrangement whereby Persephone spent six months of the year with him and six months on earth with her mother, and when Persephone is in the underworld her mother mourns and we have winter, and when she's back we have summer and the harvest. Thus Persephone is both queen of the underworld and a goddess of growth and fertility and, therefore, a goddess of change (time).
Also gratifying to note that, while the Olympians in general where really rubbish at being married and basically plagued their spouses to no end, Hades and Persephone, despite the inauspicious start, are pretty much considered to be the only happy couple in the lot.
Because this is the territory we’re in now - myths and legends and fairy tales. I’m not saying this is deliberate on Moffat’s part, just that what he taps into is vastly different to RTD’s writing. Notice that the finales to both S5 and S6 have taken place in a greenworld (parallel worlds of unstable nature, wherein all the normal rules have gone topsy turvy and the Doctor’s madness is sanity). Symbolism is often paramount, rather than an added nifty touch. Or, to quote malsperanza:
These sorts of tropes, together with talking dolls and marionettes and ventriloquists' dummies, belong to classic folktales and horror stories, rather than sci fi per se. They establish the key point that the division between what is living and what is a thing is permeable. Moffat is much given to statements like "Don't blink. Blink and you're dead" and explaining that houses have rooms that you can only see out of the corner of your eye, and that the cracks in walls are rifts in time-space. Here Be Monsters. Things that appear to be inanimate have lives (often not happy ones) and thoughts (often not nice ones), and therefore we should take the universe a lot more seriously than we do.
This is Tolkien country, where there is a willow grows aslant a brook not in order to be picturesque and pastoral, but to eat you if you are so foolish as to come too near. As Gandalf says, there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. And deep space is one of those places; the human heart is another. In Rivendell, Frodo notes, there is the memory of ancient things; in Lorien the ancient things still live on in the waking world. And as Hamlet remarks (perhaps because he is familiar with the ways of willow-trees), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a rationalist. Moffat knows that the scariest things are not chainsaws and tentacles but shadows and cracked plaster, and that the scariest things are also the most wonderful, wonderful and yet again wonderful. He knows because like most good British writers, he learned about enchanted forests from Arden and the woods near Athens; about trees that imprison mysteries from a cloven pine; about the magical transformations that occur in the deep places from the tolling of a sea-nymph's bell. The Shakespearean echoes are all over Doctor Who.
Trees! Forests! There's so much there... Anyway, this is also why motherhood and fatherhood and children and marriage - the archetypes of men and women - are the ones Moffat plays with. Like T.S.Eliot talking about The Wasteland (218):
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
So very, very much of Doctor Who in that... As in, all the women can be seen as one woman, and all the men as one man - the mirrors are deliberate. And the Doctor can in many ways be seen as Tiresias - he is the storyteller, standing outside the story, observing. (And then in turn, River is his storyteller...) Anyway, this brings me to my final point (which was also my first).
ETA: Briefly going back to the point about RTD changing the show, then props where props are due: The Moff gave the Doctor a wife (as well as a human family and a sex life!), and he did it with such slow and careful steps that this momentous, world changing development wasn't something which made people sit up and yell 'YOU CAN'T DO THAT!', but instead has them arguing over the legalities of getting married in an AU without the Doctor telling River his name... I think Moffat might be the master of smuggling elephants into a room without anyone noticing.
The Rise of the Trickster
I talked about S6 and how it changed everything. Now a lot of people have found it difficult to reconcile Ten and Eleven - how did the one turn into the other? Well, I think we were slightly misled...
S5 was our introduction to Eleven. He’s very different in temperament to Ten, reacts differently, behaves differently. But, as was still evident, the scars - and a lot of the bad habits - from the past were still there. By nature he no longer focussed on himself and his own pain, but that did not mean that those issues had gone away, nor that deeply ingrained behaviour or old traumas suddenly vanished.
Because in S6 we saw all of it return. We saw the Oncoming Storm in all his glory. The beginning of A Good man Goes To War is entirely filled with people talking about the Doctor, and his impact on others. Commander Strax, Madam Vasta, Dorium, Kovarian, all the soldiers... the Doctor goes to war, and he is a fearsome enemy. I believe that we saw part of the fallout from this in The Pandorica Opens - friends and enemies gathered to save the universe from him. Because what he had become, slowly, over the years, was A Great Warrior.
And S6 is about unlearning that - rediscovering who he really is and what his purpose is.. Essentially he is re-writing himself... Because he is not the man who leads armies into battle, no. He is... a Trickster (read the whole post, seriously!):
Trickster is not always a nice fellow, to say the least. He has something in common with bad guys--liars and thieves and confidence men; cheats. In Norse mythology Loki is a Trickster; so is Rumplestiltskin. [list of examples] He is a shape-shifter, and as such has a lot in common with the androgyne, the cross-dresser, and the masker. In his most powerful form, he is a god, and can reshape not only himself, but nature itself.
Now the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, is how the Doctor gets out of his unavoidable death: He cheats. Yes he has already made up his mind to go through with it, and thus learns a valuable lesson about not holding himself above the Laws of Time (also see Abraham sacrificing Isaac re. this), but when the opportunity presents itself... he straight up cheats. Cons the universe. It’s beautifully elegant, actually, and very much ties back to Seven (who is my darling) and his essential manipulativeness. And it couldn’t be further from Ten, and his need to step in and be the focus ("Look at me! Look at me!" <- Ten was 'Handlebars' all the way...). Consider all Ten’s Christmas Specials... In every one (sort of bar the one with Astrid), it is the Doctor who stands firm and saves the day. Everything hinges on his decisions... And oh, how far we’ve come from that, by now. Remember this?
THE DOCTOR: Actually, that's not true. Christmas is a time of -- of peace and thanksgiving and...what am I on about? Christmas is always like this.
With Eleven Christmas truly is a time of peace and thanksgiving. Because here is another thought: I believe that Eleven’s Christmas Specials bookend the development of S6.
First of all, A Christmas Carol set out where the characters were currently at, and laid out the story & themes to come through Kazran & Abigail. (See this post for more a indepth analysis.) For now I want to point out that the Doctor saves the day in a very Trickster-y way, but the story still hinges heavily on his actions, and he throws down the gauntlet when he argues with Kazran without a moment’s hesitation.
So A Christmas Carol - quite literally - marks the point where the Doctor is ‘halfway out of the dark’: In the middle between the darkness of Ten, and the new light at the end of S6.
Because Kazran is changed so much that he can no longer operate the machine that controls the skies, and indeed, the Doctor is now so changed that it is hard to look on Ten and believe it is the same man...
Which brings us to this year’s Christmas Special, where we take a step back and have a look at what the consequences are of this season. Where has our Doctor ended up? The answer: A pure Trickster, more or less. (The Doctor is of course too complex a character to fit into any category completely.) But, like I said before, his role in this episode is as ‘the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling’. Indeed, he starts off needing Madge’s help as he falls to earth - ‘a spaceman, possibly an angel’ she describes him as, and her husband huffs and talks about how she always brings home strays... (A clue if ever there was one that she is being paralleled to the Doctor.)
And then, throughout the episode, he is the guide, the one who explains what is going on (the teller of the tale: “Your mother is flying a forest through the time vortex, be a little impressed!”), but he is not the one who saves the day. He merely helps people save themselves... as well as a whole bunch of trees! :)
But there is a final lesson. We saw that in A Christmas Carol that he was now (once more) bringing others into his own world, taking Kazran and Abigail to wonderful Christmasses everywhere (and once joining in theirs), no longer desperately seeking refuge in loneliness as he once did. From The Next Doctor:
[Why am I alone and without companions?] “They leave. Because they should. Or they find someone else. And some of them... some of them forget me. I suppose, in the end... (pause) They break my heart.”
However, this is a very, very self-centered worldview. And Moffat turns round and, through Madge, tells the Doctor in no uncertain terms that other people’s heart matter too: How dare he let his friends - the people who love him - think he’s dead at Christmas?
Now this is not something I’m going to blame RTD for particularly, although he certainly took it as far as he could. Because the Doctor has always been kind, but... aloof. This is, after all, the man who locked his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS before saying goodbye...
He's mellowed as he's gotten older (he now adores people and is always ready with a hug), but he invariably keeps a personal distance - reluctant to let anyone close, and the Time War obviously only made this worse. He is getting better, but River had to basically hold the universe hostage before he'd marry her/let her in, and it clearly chafed that she should have such demands.
But then (*cheers for Madge*) he gets told that it’s not about him. His pain isn’t more important than other people’s (here - help me dance on the Lonely God’s grave, will you?) and he goes off to spend Christmas with the Ponds. And then we get a proper Christmas miracle...
Because - of course - the Ponds are not just friends. They’re family. And the Doctor learns a final lesson, which was foreshadowed all the way back in Victory of the Daleks:
DOCTOR: Good. Remember it now, Edwin! The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad and losing them and men in the trenches you saw die... Remember it! Feel it, because you're human. You're not like them. You are not like the Daleks!
BRACEWELL: It hurts! Doctor, it hurts so much!
DOCTOR: Good! Good! Good! Brilliant! Embrace it. That means you're alive! They cannot explode that bomb, you're a human being! [...] It's not working, I can't stop it!
[...]
AMY: Hey... Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't?
BRACEWELL: W... What?
AMY: Hurts, doesn't it? But kind of a good hurt.
BRACEWELL: I really shouldn't talk about her.
AMY: Oh. There's a her.
‘Kind of a good hurt’. Crying when you’re happy. What makes humans human isn’t pain - it’s love. If River’s lesson in TWoRS was that he is worthy of love, then this is the point where he understands what that means in practical terms: He is loved, and so he has a responsibility towards those who love him. And it has nothing to do with saving them, or watching over them, but about quite simply being with them. Sharing time with them. Letting them in, and allowing himself to be a part of them in return.
And so, romance and intellect triumph over brute force and cynicism one last, final time - because, paradoxically, by making the Doctor as Doctor-y [Trickster-y, alien] as possible, he has become more human than he ever was.
I shall finish with a quote by the_royal_anna, because it is one of my favourites ever, and fits so perfectly that it takes my breath away. What a wonderous message for Christmas Day, and one the Doctor finally understands, I think. I can't wait to see where we go from here.
We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
♥
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time: hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.
SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
Doctor Who?
You can see New Who as the Doctor trying to work out who he is now, what with a) Being the murderer of his own kind and b) If he's the only Timelord left, then what a Timelord is is up to him. Ten searches high and low for something to be, some kind of self, some sort of definition (Rose's Love, Martha's Hero, Donna's Friend, The Timelord Victorious) but in the end can only be what he is: The Doctor ("It's my honour"). And so S5 and 6 is the story of trying to find his way back, step by difficult step, re-learning what makes him him. And although he's going in the right direction, there are wrong turns and many pitfalls (Ten was *so* screwed up), until he manages to finally be back where he was: The Doctor. Just the Doctor.
Or, to quote malsperanza (from this post):
To me that is rather interesting, and I think is connected with the idea of the Withheld Hero, though I'm not sure how. Sometimes heroes do not grow, learn, become better people, blah blah, because they don't need to. Odysseus doesn't need to "learn" anything; there are no moral lessons for him in the end. What he needs is to Get Home; he is the same man at the beginning and end of the poem. Ditto Jack Sparrow--in contrast to the young romantic hero of PotC, who undergoes a radical transformation from polite working-class fellow to law-breaking pirate and thence to member of the upper class (by marriage).
You see how perfectly this fits with the most basic concept of Doctor Who? To quote Moffat:
The story happens to the companion, not The Doctor. It’s only when he’s got someone to show off to that its happening. That’s why I think the story starts again every time a new person takes that decision to go into that blue box.
But RTD changed that - during the Specials he placed the Doctor squarely in the centre of everything (and this had been building for quite some time). Which means that in order to become himself again, the Doctor needed to step out of the spotlight and become the Withheld Hero/Trickster once more. Which proved to be an interesting and rather unusual journey, actually...
ETA: Please allow me to gloat a tiny little bit, as what I have described so far was exactly what Day of the Doctor did. Right down to the phrasing:
[Spoilers for Day of the Doctor]
Clara: We’ve got enough warriors. And any old idiot can be a hero.
Eleven: Then what do I do?
Clara: What you’ve always done. Be a Doctor!
And later:
Eleven: At last I know where I'm going. Where I've always been going. Home, the long way round.
♥
Let’s begin with how the Doctor ‘went wrong’. I think it’s generally acknowledged that RTD *broke* the Doctor, and Moffat’s been putting him back together, and here I am interested in the *how*. Because I think that was RTD did was to turn the Doctor into a Tragic Hero. I’m not saying he did this deliberately (or even consciously), but that was the end result. Allow me to illustrate:
The Tragic Hero
- the protagonist suffers
- the protagonist stands before a decision
- the protagonist decides in an "unnatural" way, denying personal emotions and urges
- the protagonist endures more than s/he deserves
- the protagonist has a dark/bad fate from the beginning but is unable to accept responsibility for her/his flaws/weaknesses
- the protagonist is of noble descent but in a way that the audience is able to identify
- the protagonist has to see and understand her/his fate as well as understanding that her/his behavior will be her/his doom
- the hero story should combine fear and empathy
- ideally, the protagonist is a king or leader who draws his people into the abyss, too, while they're the witnesses
- the protagonist has to be intelligent and able to learn from mistakes
- tragic virtue
(Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805)
I’m not even going to do my usual thing of illustrating stuff with images, because it doesn’t need it. It’s that obvious. Now the funny thing is that this is actually what I've been saying all along. Ten is a hero, Eleven is a wizard. And the Doctor ought to be a wizard. He even calls himself Gandalf. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let’s look at what KIND of Tragic Hero Ten is...
The Lonely God
There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human. (A point I won’t elaborate on, but which I think is fairy obvious.) Except - and oh, the irony of this is immense - the only way he can fit is as a god-like figure: Someone even more removed from humanity than an alien. Because the human world has rules and patterns, and someone with a Timelord's abilities can never be 'ordinary' and indeed he chafes at it, when he tries - he loves them, even as he is unable to be them. We see this in Family of Blood/Human Nature where he delights in turning himself human - and yet won’t go back.
So, focussed on fitting into their world, he ends up as humanity's god (both literally and narratively), and it is something of a thread going right through RTD’s Who...
Humanity prays/calls out to him, and he answers. They believe, and saves them. (Interestingly S2 is the only finale where this doesn’t apply, but then that is focussed squarely on the Doctor’s loss of Rose.) In the end he tries to set himself up as god of the whole universe (hello Mars!), and Ood Sigma may be the ultimate sign of this: The universe asks for his help to defeat Gallifrey (the Ood were given the gift of seeing through time and the ability to reach out to the Doctor, so he could save them...)
And the Doctor (not surprisingly with so much encouragement) sees himself as having to sacrifice himself to save the world (hello there god-complex, thinking we are Jesus?), because that is the pattern, that is the story he wants to fit into. He even gets a Requiem... (“The universe will sing you to your sleep.”)
And this is why Marble House accuses him: ‘If you are our God, our Saviour, then WHY DON'T YOU SAVE US [from ourselves]? ‘
Also this is why he has to be lonely - the pattern he tries to fit into is a monotheistic one. [Disregarding *actual* Christian theology - it all gets too complex there. /understatement ] But from a simplistic perspective, then he is a Lonely God.
Following on from this we can see why turning his companions into himself is so deadly, and has such terrible consequences. Both Rose and Donna literally become him, and it [almost] kills them (although he manages to save Rose - but not before she has created Jack). Trying to cram the knowledge of a Timelord into a human by force - both Rose and Donna absorb the ability to see all of time the way the Doctor does - is deadly, and nearly burns them up.
Martha gets a better deal by becoming his prophet/apostle, preaching the Good News - yet it is in many ways a thankless task, since he can never love her the way she wants him to. (And indeed, his love could be fatal, so she probably counts herself lucky in the end.)
But Jack, trying to model himself into the Doctor mould (and the whole of Torchwood, generally) is another cautionary tale: This sort of power/responsibility is too much for humans. Sarah Jane gets off better, but even she loses the love of her life, because of what she chooses to be. With great power comes great responsibility, and this both Jack and Sarah Jane learn to their cost.
And the problem is that this is not who the Doctor is. Ten is caught between worlds, denying his real nature, and the compromise tears him apart. Basically - by reaching for power that is wrong for him (like diesel in a petrol engine), he ends up destroying instead of healing.
We see this most clearly in Waters of Mars which is... anti-Doctor Who? I will bring out 'Intellect and Romance Triumph over Brute Force and Cynicism' a fair bit, but the resolution to Waters of Mars is every inch brute force and cynicism winning. After all, how else could you describe Adelaide's suicide?
Now the Doctor's story in New Who so far is really quite astonishing. When I say that RTD broke him, I really mean that. But to be able to go there - naturally, organically - and then [with Moffat] Back again... Damn that's impressive. Here, have a bunch of quotes to show what I mean:
DOCTOR:
Rose - there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation. The whole world's different because he's alive.
Father's Day
DOCTOR:
Adelaide, I've done this sort of thing before, in small ways, saved some little people. But never someone as important as you. Oh, I'm good!
ADELAIDE:
Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant? You?
Waters of Mars
DOCTOR (about Abigail):
Who's she?
KAZRAN:
Nobody important.
DOCTOR:
Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, and I've never met anyone who wasn't important before.
A Christmas Carol
See what I mean? There and back again... How on EARTH did RTD break the show so seamlessly that it seemed inevitable? How did we reach a point where a hero had to commit suicide in order for the Doctor to start caring? I guess in part it's the inevitability of it... He is told that he is The Lonely God, so that is what he becomes.
Now, apart from all the other problems with Godhood, the specific problems with the monotheistic approach Ten had was that a) That sort of god is omnipotent (which the Doctor, well, isn’t) and b) That sort of god can have no fellow deities. Other powers are either false gods or demons. There can be angels and apostles and all kinds of different followers, but people are either for him, or against him, and it makes the morality both more simplistic and more complicated. The Doctor has to be ‘good’, because otherwise the whole thing collapses, but what happens when he does something morally questionable? Water of Mars is straightforward, actually, because there he is a Fallen God, but otherwise the show tends to give him unequivocal evil to fight against (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, Evil Timelords) - they are evil, ergo he is good. Which is... difficult to work with, because he is so clearly flawed.
The Mad Man With A Box
Now what Moffat has done so brilliantly is that (apart from dismantling The Lonely God, as previously shown) he didn't throw the 'god' idea out of the window (because the Doctor does have powers that far outweigh any human's and to deny that would be foolish), but just changed it radically. Moffat (re-)turned the Doctor to a world of fairy tales and myths and magic. (Also see this whole post.) A world where every tree and every shadow might be alive, where the cosmos is filled with all kinds of powers, small and large, each with their allocated space, each with their own purpose, and governed by their own rules (and often a lot of symbolism - see hand-tying). Here, the Doctor's Trickster-character fits in. To quote malsperanza (I do that a lot):
The Trickster is often not the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
I think the important thing is that while the Doctor might be god-like from a human POV, in his own [green]world, he is quite simply being who/what he is supposed to be. He works with magic/science [‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'], and just operates on a different level to our world. His role is different to that of a human - just like a faun or centaur or dwarf or elf or fairy occupies a different role to a human, and has different powers and strengths. Neither better or worse, just different.
Let me throw in another quote - this one by lonewytch and it’s about CAL's symbol (which is just like Kazran's clock!):
While we're on norse mythology, I have to comment on the library/CAL's symbol. In the world tree and in many branches of shamanism, this world, the physical one we live in “middle earth” or Midgard meaning “the middle enclosure”, lies at the centre. Above we have the upperworld usually associated with the gods, and underneath, the underworld usually associated with the ancestors. CAL's symbol mirrors this concept nicely, the upper swirl and the lower swirl are reflections of each other, cupping the upper and lower worlds, while the circle of Midgard is at the centre.
Now the Doctor still occupies a somewhat god-like role, but it’s not one that puts him above humans in any way. Because mythical gods are fallible. The stories of the pagan gods (from any culture, really) are full of love and betrayal and war and trickery, as well as the gods interfering in human affairs - and not always doing so in a good way. Expecting 'perfection', or even inherent 'goodness', from the gods is invariably foolish. Not that the Doctor isn't good, but he is as prone to screwing up as anyone else. He acts from his own personal moral code, and this is sometimes different to humans’. Or other people’s. In both S5 and S6 we have forces fighting the Doctor, and although their methods are questionable, they themselves are acting from motives every bit as pure as the Doctor’s. To quote the Moff himself:
...but I remember one morning that Russell and I had a long email discussion about the banality of evil. Before we got bored! But I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' - it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that - the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view.
And this is why the common thread in Moffat’s Who so far isn’t ‘Save us’, but quite the opposite:
The Doctor quite simply can’t do it on his own. Now you can point out (and you’d be right to) that this is also the lesson from the Ten era. But Ten’s story is about the Doctor trying to do it on his own, and the folly therein, whereas Eleven (so far) is about learning to ask for help. (And the Christmas Special is the final piece - but I’ll get to that.)
Hades and Persephone
Of course River is pivotal in this since he isn't alone anymore - he has someone to hold him accountable, someone to challenge his presumptions and arrogance - a mirror, a helpmate, someone to balance him out. Much like the CAL/Kazran symbol, it’s about balance. And River is not someone abruptly gifted with Timelord powers - she is the Child of the TARDIS, as well as having been manipulated by the Silence, something she - and everyone connected to her - pays for dearly. But she is what she is - she can’t be undone, her powers cannot be taken from her, because they are an organic part of her.
I remember Promethia saying when watching The Big Bang, that the moment when the Doctor reappeared with River (after having saved her from the exploding TARDIS) her instinctive reaction was:
'Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now.'
And that truly is their role! Rather than a whole world (Gallifrey), aloof and remote, to watch over the universe, we have a Mother and a Father figure - very hands-on, but also elusive and mythical. Fairy tales, or myths, made real. And of course they're married. Notice that in the last two images in my composite picture (those from LKH and TWoRS) the Doctor is directly asking River for help. He is slowly learning that he can’t do everything by himself, and asking for help is beginning to be instinctual.
A straightforward love story is always inward looking, the characters caught up in each other. But the Doctor and River focussing only on each other is actually dangerous (unstoppable force/immovable object - also see the Master). They need to be side-by-side (or back-to-back), focussing all that energy out. Because the heart of Eleven's story in S6 is about restoring order, and the marriage is the final piece. To quote lonewytch again:
This is sealed by their marriage at the end of The Wedding of River Song where they are re-enacting the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage. This is a concept prevalent in myth and in rituals from different cultures, that of either symbolically or physically enacting the unification of the God and Goddess into One. The Doctor talks about the two of them being at either pole of the event which has caused time to collapse and that it is union of these poles through touch which will save the universe. This is fundamentally the union of masculine and feminine, of intellect (the Doctor in TWoRS) and Heart (River - who is fully acting from Love in the ep).
And now, isn't that just 'Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism' at its most basic? Here’s one I made earlier:
And this is why I made it. Really, thinking about it, then the Doctor getting married is the most Doctor-y thing he has ever done, and something which re-enforces everything the show stands for.
♥ ♥ ♥
But, to briefly touch on the actual heading for this, I shall quote the brilliant janie_aire:
Remember! Again, we get the juxtaposition of remembering and dying, which has been thematic throughout Eleven's run. In the Ancient Greek myths, the souls of the Dead were ferried across the River, where they would meet the Lord and Lady of the Underworld: Hades, Lord of Desire, who is the husband to and the end of Persephone, Goddess of Change, who is wife to and the end of Hades. The end of desire and the end of change (time) are complementary. They are each others' ends.
I am not going to go into detail re. Hades and Persephone, but for anyone interested, I’d urge you to go look up the myths. Here’s a very brief summary, courtesy of Promethia:
Persephone was the daughter of Demeter (goddess of grain and the harvest) by Zeus. Hades, god of the underworld, stole her away to be his wife, causing Demeter to throw fits of grief and cause famine throughout the land. Eventually the famine forced Hades to give her back (I think maybe Zeus intervened to make his brother give her up?), but while in the underworld, Persephone had consumed six pomegranate seeds and, what with the way these things work, it meant that she was never able to fully leave the underworld again. So basically Hades and Demeter worked out an arrangement whereby Persephone spent six months of the year with him and six months on earth with her mother, and when Persephone is in the underworld her mother mourns and we have winter, and when she's back we have summer and the harvest. Thus Persephone is both queen of the underworld and a goddess of growth and fertility and, therefore, a goddess of change (time).
Also gratifying to note that, while the Olympians in general where really rubbish at being married and basically plagued their spouses to no end, Hades and Persephone, despite the inauspicious start, are pretty much considered to be the only happy couple in the lot.
Because this is the territory we’re in now - myths and legends and fairy tales. I’m not saying this is deliberate on Moffat’s part, just that what he taps into is vastly different to RTD’s writing. Notice that the finales to both S5 and S6 have taken place in a greenworld (parallel worlds of unstable nature, wherein all the normal rules have gone topsy turvy and the Doctor’s madness is sanity). Symbolism is often paramount, rather than an added nifty touch. Or, to quote malsperanza:
These sorts of tropes, together with talking dolls and marionettes and ventriloquists' dummies, belong to classic folktales and horror stories, rather than sci fi per se. They establish the key point that the division between what is living and what is a thing is permeable. Moffat is much given to statements like "Don't blink. Blink and you're dead" and explaining that houses have rooms that you can only see out of the corner of your eye, and that the cracks in walls are rifts in time-space. Here Be Monsters. Things that appear to be inanimate have lives (often not happy ones) and thoughts (often not nice ones), and therefore we should take the universe a lot more seriously than we do.
This is Tolkien country, where there is a willow grows aslant a brook not in order to be picturesque and pastoral, but to eat you if you are so foolish as to come too near. As Gandalf says, there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. And deep space is one of those places; the human heart is another. In Rivendell, Frodo notes, there is the memory of ancient things; in Lorien the ancient things still live on in the waking world. And as Hamlet remarks (perhaps because he is familiar with the ways of willow-trees), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a rationalist. Moffat knows that the scariest things are not chainsaws and tentacles but shadows and cracked plaster, and that the scariest things are also the most wonderful, wonderful and yet again wonderful. He knows because like most good British writers, he learned about enchanted forests from Arden and the woods near Athens; about trees that imprison mysteries from a cloven pine; about the magical transformations that occur in the deep places from the tolling of a sea-nymph's bell. The Shakespearean echoes are all over Doctor Who.
Trees! Forests! There's so much there... Anyway, this is also why motherhood and fatherhood and children and marriage - the archetypes of men and women - are the ones Moffat plays with. Like T.S.Eliot talking about The Wasteland (218):
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
So very, very much of Doctor Who in that... As in, all the women can be seen as one woman, and all the men as one man - the mirrors are deliberate. And the Doctor can in many ways be seen as Tiresias - he is the storyteller, standing outside the story, observing. (And then in turn, River is his storyteller...) Anyway, this brings me to my final point (which was also my first).
ETA: Briefly going back to the point about RTD changing the show, then props where props are due: The Moff gave the Doctor a wife (as well as a human family and a sex life!), and he did it with such slow and careful steps that this momentous, world changing development wasn't something which made people sit up and yell 'YOU CAN'T DO THAT!', but instead has them arguing over the legalities of getting married in an AU without the Doctor telling River his name... I think Moffat might be the master of smuggling elephants into a room without anyone noticing.
The Rise of the Trickster
I talked about S6 and how it changed everything. Now a lot of people have found it difficult to reconcile Ten and Eleven - how did the one turn into the other? Well, I think we were slightly misled...
S5 was our introduction to Eleven. He’s very different in temperament to Ten, reacts differently, behaves differently. But, as was still evident, the scars - and a lot of the bad habits - from the past were still there. By nature he no longer focussed on himself and his own pain, but that did not mean that those issues had gone away, nor that deeply ingrained behaviour or old traumas suddenly vanished.
Because in S6 we saw all of it return. We saw the Oncoming Storm in all his glory. The beginning of A Good man Goes To War is entirely filled with people talking about the Doctor, and his impact on others. Commander Strax, Madam Vasta, Dorium, Kovarian, all the soldiers... the Doctor goes to war, and he is a fearsome enemy. I believe that we saw part of the fallout from this in The Pandorica Opens - friends and enemies gathered to save the universe from him. Because what he had become, slowly, over the years, was A Great Warrior.
And S6 is about unlearning that - rediscovering who he really is and what his purpose is.. Essentially he is re-writing himself... Because he is not the man who leads armies into battle, no. He is... a Trickster (read the whole post, seriously!):
Trickster is not always a nice fellow, to say the least. He has something in common with bad guys--liars and thieves and confidence men; cheats. In Norse mythology Loki is a Trickster; so is Rumplestiltskin. [list of examples] He is a shape-shifter, and as such has a lot in common with the androgyne, the cross-dresser, and the masker. In his most powerful form, he is a god, and can reshape not only himself, but nature itself.
Now the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, is how the Doctor gets out of his unavoidable death: He cheats. Yes he has already made up his mind to go through with it, and thus learns a valuable lesson about not holding himself above the Laws of Time (also see Abraham sacrificing Isaac re. this), but when the opportunity presents itself... he straight up cheats. Cons the universe. It’s beautifully elegant, actually, and very much ties back to Seven (who is my darling) and his essential manipulativeness. And it couldn’t be further from Ten, and his need to step in and be the focus ("Look at me! Look at me!" <- Ten was 'Handlebars' all the way...). Consider all Ten’s Christmas Specials... In every one (sort of bar the one with Astrid), it is the Doctor who stands firm and saves the day. Everything hinges on his decisions... And oh, how far we’ve come from that, by now. Remember this?
THE DOCTOR: Actually, that's not true. Christmas is a time of -- of peace and thanksgiving and...what am I on about? Christmas is always like this.
With Eleven Christmas truly is a time of peace and thanksgiving. Because here is another thought: I believe that Eleven’s Christmas Specials bookend the development of S6.
First of all, A Christmas Carol set out where the characters were currently at, and laid out the story & themes to come through Kazran & Abigail. (See this post for more a indepth analysis.) For now I want to point out that the Doctor saves the day in a very Trickster-y way, but the story still hinges heavily on his actions, and he throws down the gauntlet when he argues with Kazran without a moment’s hesitation.
So A Christmas Carol - quite literally - marks the point where the Doctor is ‘halfway out of the dark’: In the middle between the darkness of Ten, and the new light at the end of S6.
Because Kazran is changed so much that he can no longer operate the machine that controls the skies, and indeed, the Doctor is now so changed that it is hard to look on Ten and believe it is the same man...
Which brings us to this year’s Christmas Special, where we take a step back and have a look at what the consequences are of this season. Where has our Doctor ended up? The answer: A pure Trickster, more or less. (The Doctor is of course too complex a character to fit into any category completely.) But, like I said before, his role in this episode is as ‘the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling’. Indeed, he starts off needing Madge’s help as he falls to earth - ‘a spaceman, possibly an angel’ she describes him as, and her husband huffs and talks about how she always brings home strays... (A clue if ever there was one that she is being paralleled to the Doctor.)
And then, throughout the episode, he is the guide, the one who explains what is going on (the teller of the tale: “Your mother is flying a forest through the time vortex, be a little impressed!”), but he is not the one who saves the day. He merely helps people save themselves... as well as a whole bunch of trees! :)
But there is a final lesson. We saw that in A Christmas Carol that he was now (once more) bringing others into his own world, taking Kazran and Abigail to wonderful Christmasses everywhere (and once joining in theirs), no longer desperately seeking refuge in loneliness as he once did. From The Next Doctor:
[Why am I alone and without companions?] “They leave. Because they should. Or they find someone else. And some of them... some of them forget me. I suppose, in the end... (pause) They break my heart.”
However, this is a very, very self-centered worldview. And Moffat turns round and, through Madge, tells the Doctor in no uncertain terms that other people’s heart matter too: How dare he let his friends - the people who love him - think he’s dead at Christmas?
Now this is not something I’m going to blame RTD for particularly, although he certainly took it as far as he could. Because the Doctor has always been kind, but... aloof. This is, after all, the man who locked his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS before saying goodbye...
He's mellowed as he's gotten older (he now adores people and is always ready with a hug), but he invariably keeps a personal distance - reluctant to let anyone close, and the Time War obviously only made this worse. He is getting better, but River had to basically hold the universe hostage before he'd marry her/let her in, and it clearly chafed that she should have such demands.
But then (*cheers for Madge*) he gets told that it’s not about him. His pain isn’t more important than other people’s (here - help me dance on the Lonely God’s grave, will you?) and he goes off to spend Christmas with the Ponds. And then we get a proper Christmas miracle...
Because - of course - the Ponds are not just friends. They’re family. And the Doctor learns a final lesson, which was foreshadowed all the way back in Victory of the Daleks:
DOCTOR: Good. Remember it now, Edwin! The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad and losing them and men in the trenches you saw die... Remember it! Feel it, because you're human. You're not like them. You are not like the Daleks!
BRACEWELL: It hurts! Doctor, it hurts so much!
DOCTOR: Good! Good! Good! Brilliant! Embrace it. That means you're alive! They cannot explode that bomb, you're a human being! [...] It's not working, I can't stop it!
[...]
AMY: Hey... Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't?
BRACEWELL: W... What?
AMY: Hurts, doesn't it? But kind of a good hurt.
BRACEWELL: I really shouldn't talk about her.
AMY: Oh. There's a her.
‘Kind of a good hurt’. Crying when you’re happy. What makes humans human isn’t pain - it’s love. If River’s lesson in TWoRS was that he is worthy of love, then this is the point where he understands what that means in practical terms: He is loved, and so he has a responsibility towards those who love him. And it has nothing to do with saving them, or watching over them, but about quite simply being with them. Sharing time with them. Letting them in, and allowing himself to be a part of them in return.
And so, romance and intellect triumph over brute force and cynicism one last, final time - because, paradoxically, by making the Doctor as Doctor-y [Trickster-y, alien] as possible, he has become more human than he ever was.
I shall finish with a quote by the_royal_anna, because it is one of my favourites ever, and fits so perfectly that it takes my breath away. What a wonderous message for Christmas Day, and one the Doctor finally understands, I think. I can't wait to see where we go from here.
We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
♥